Havish Montak was bored. Very bored. Certain people were starting to react to Welp Squad (best squad, just saying) fleets in much the same way as some parents react when they see the handsome guy stroll down the street. In the case of the parents, they lock up their daughters. In the case of a lot of New Eden, they dock up their ships. Locking and docking. Boring. Havish decided to enrich his mind with some erudite reading, then thought, “Fuck that” and turned instead to Reddit. He was in luck.
A post by the twenty-fifth best FC in the Goonswarm Federation (GSF) caught his eye. It was all about how Sort Dragon had sounded the retreat in order to protect Deklein from the attention of the aforementioned thirty-fifth best FC and a couple of small USTZ SIGs called Black Ops and Reavers. Havish read the thread and decided he liked the salt. He then decided to add to the content by casually mentioning that Welp Squad were coming. Nobody responded, but they didn’t need to. The response would definitely come later as Welp Squad racked up the pressure.
How do you rack up the pressure? You rack it up by running fun fleets. The funnest fleets. You get the eleventy-first best FC in Welp Squad to lead and you go out and do the worst thing you can do in the current meta. You go and do entosis. Yes, that’s right. Entosis. Want a response? Go and entosis something. You can’t dock up your ships if someone’s doing entosis, or your house will fall down around you. So you respond. No problem, you’re probably thinking. A random bunch of Goon scrublords hitting a structure just to annoy us. Your scout reports they aren’t even in the same corps. Just randoms. You unship some big, scary ships and head over to run them off.
You get handed your big, scary ships back in little pieces because these aren’t random scrublords. These are serious scrublords. Welp Squad takes from everywhere in GSF and beyond and the sort of people who join are generally those who have a vague idea about what they are doing. You are now scratching your heads in the darkness (geddit?) trying to work out what to do and your ihubs and tcus are dying. One by one, they are toasted. Entire areas are being reffed and you are floundering about in the dark. Eventually, somebody undocks the big, scary fleet that will wipe out the Welp Squad fleet, so Welp Squad fade away (fade… geddit?) into the darkness (I kill myself, really) and vanish. For a while. But not for long and the cycle repeats. More ihubs, more tcus, more ships die, the big, scary monster is unleashed again and Welp Squad moonwalks out. So, balls to you – blue ones, that is.
Does Welp Squad lose ships on these trips? Of course. But the pilots are not sad. For sure, green is nicer than red on zkillboard, but a combination of SRP and insurance means that you tend to come out in profit every time you die so there’s no discernible sting. Welp squad use Tech 1 ships to kill Tech 2 enemies and they have a ball doing it. Targets of opportunity are the name of the game, so it’s really very hard to predict where they will pop up next. The only thing you can be sure of is that they will and that the darkness is no longer a place to hide, but a place of nightmares (ok, so they don’t actually use nightmares on these trips, but a place of Mauluses didn’t quite have the same ring to it).
VRH-H7, WQY-IQ… where next? That’s the thing with targets of opportunity – you never really know. Enjoy the wait our northern friends, but fret not; if you live in the dark, you will know soon.
Fancy lighting the way and joining in with the fun? Join Welp Squad and you can.
Footnote
Just back from a 3 hour April Fool fleet. It wasn’t meant to be three hours and two paps, but that’s how it ended up. We formed Jackdaws and accompanying logi, tackle and scouts and set off from 1DQ. Word came of a super in distress so we raced over to try and save it – chased some dreads around a bit, then jumped into Thera and from there into Geminate. Messed around with CO2 as we ran through Geminate, into Vale of The Silent and then Great Wildlands, then back into Geminate to say hello to Horde in O-V. Played tag there for a while with some good fights until they formed rather a lot of Caracals, so we used a bit of misdirection and moonwalked out the long way round. Didn’t even notice the time until we were on the last stretch home heading up the pipe from Catch to Querious. Not every fleet is that long (by any means), but it’s usually a blast and last night was no exception.
No sooner had I got back to 1DQ then I pulled another hat on and immediately handed out an Atron as part of my work for the Gooniversity Faculty. There is literally no shortage of things to do in GSF – the biggest struggle is trying to find the time to do them all…
